Ahlam Shibli
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Refuge
in Frost
Ulrich
Loock, 2005
 There is one specific feature which distinguishes
Ahlam Shibli’s photographs of “Refuge in the Frost” from the pictures
of “Goter” (2002-2003) and other thematic, earlier series like “Unrecognized”
(1999-2000) or “Self Portrait” (2000): the issue of aiming and focusing.
Aiming and focusing relate to a practice of cutting and separating
one part from the other, and of excluding what escapes the center
of vision. Arguably, this type of action is part of the nature of
photography, and therefore Walter Benjamin compared the photographer
to a surgeon. Looking from one image of “Refuge” to the other, they
appear as though snatched from a given situation, wilfully and at
random – their diversity in terms of the subject matter, the organization
of the image and the relation between photographer/spectator, and
the things depicted being a form to make explicitly manifest the
pointed action informing any photographic practice. Or, inversely,
the separation which is performed by the act of taking a picture
is reflected and pushed to an extraordinary emphasis by the incoherence
of the images of “Refuge in the Frost.”
 The issues of aiming and focusing, of cutting and
excluding, are what unites these images. The picture of a man wearing
sunglasses, rising from a small crowd of blurred figures and
pointing his camera at an invisible object, appears like a displaced
mirror image of the photographer herself. Two further images
metaphorize the place and the tool of her doing: a shooting range
and rifles. If these pictures refer to transitive action, however,
they are informed at the same time by a lack of accomplishment:
the guns are unused, and the photographer holding up his camera
has his eyes covered by black glasses like a blind man. Regarding
the ‘other
side,’ the side of things or people being aimed at, the boy between
the buffers or the long-haired young man on the bed – not being
successfully targeted despite ample proclamation of a forceful approach
– do not really return the photographer’s gaze, even though looking
in her direction. What she will rather encounter in place of their
gazes is the Medusa’s head of the immoveable figure of a mannequin
in a crowded street in Japan. This is the photographer’s risk: she
may be petrified by the gaze from the face at which she is looking.
 People who commit suicide by jumping off a bridge
usually do not really want to die. Looking
ahead of them, they rather see that any passage at the end of the
road is impenetrable and choose sideways the only opening available
to escape.
Pictures of a street in Akka (Acre)
or in Marseille or the picture of a hallway in Yokohama represent
what they might see: lines that recede to close off the space in
some distance. There is also the picture of a window – Alberti might
have extended to the photographic image his metaphor of the window
for the panel painting which employed the perspectival method of
rendering spatial depth to lead the gaze to another reality beyond
– and the view from this window is blocked by a cinder block wall
not more than a few feet away. Finally, the perspective of receding
lines forming a closure in the distance can undergo inversion (Chinese
perspective) to generate an image of the corner of a building pointing
at the spectator, adorned with street signs announcing ‘wrong way’ and ‘no staying.’
This inversion turns focusing into unfocusing: the five people in
the picture have been photographed in a moment of utter disparity
in their relations to one another. And finally, as if the pictorial
reality were retroacting, a flash of light backfires at the optical
machine, exceding the latter’s power of registration.
From “Unrecognized” to “Self Portrait” to “Goter”
(Go there!) to “Refuge in the Frost”:this is the consequence of
a journey to exile. “Refuge” is marked by a distance that is not
measured like the distance of the photographer from the situation
she is dealing with in “Goter.” It can be attempted to be bridged
only by the flight of the bodyless gaze … breaking up the coherence
of a series of photographs … emphasizing the punctuating action
of photography and in return being confronted by things, people
turning against being turned into pictures … to the point of obliterating,
annihilating the image and blinding the viewer.
This article was published in the catalog:
Dreaming Art Dreaming Reality. Tel Aviv Museum Of Art and Nathan Gottesdiener
Foundation. Tel Aviv, 2005. |